Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

Started by Josquius, February 20, 2016, 07:46:34 AM

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How would you vote on Britain remaining in the EU?

British- Remain
12 (12%)
British - Leave
7 (7%)
Other European - Remain
21 (21%)
Other European - Leave
6 (6%)
ROTW - Remain
34 (34%)
ROTW - Leave
20 (20%)

Total Members Voted: 98

Syt

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
—Stephen Jay Gould

Proud owner of 42 Zoupa Points.

Grey Fox

Colonel Caliga is Awesome.

Tamas

Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 05, 2022, 11:48:01 PMIn England a booster shot is called a borcestershire shot.

Stolen from interweb.

 :lol:

Yeah that took some getting used to here.

Display on train: next stop, Worcester Park. Audio announcer: next stop: wosta' park

Sheilbh

Piece by Hadley Freeman in the Jewish Chronicle. From what I understand she's left the Guardian because of her "gender critical" stance, but I heard her speak and she also mentioned that she was discouraged from writing about Corbyn/Labour/anti-semitism because she's Jewish - which isn't great.

So I thought this was interesting for calling out some of the comments she received as a Jew, on the left who was raising the issue of anti-semitism in Labour during Corbyn's leadership. I think Starmer's done all of the right things on this, but I think at some point there needs to be a bit of a confrontation/reckoning on this on the left especially with people who just looked the other way or said any of the things Freeman flags here:
QuoteIt sucks to be a Jew on the left
As Hadley Freeman leaves the Guardian for the Sunday Times, she opens up about her Jewish experience
December 06, 2022 10:57

Last week was my last day at the Guardian, where I've worked for more than 22 years. Quite a seminal moment for me, probably less so for all of you, but it did make me think about what it's been like in recent years to be Jewish, British and on the left.

The Guardian is the newspaper of the British left, of course, and I am now off to the Sunday Times, which is not. My own political persuasions haven't changed, by which I mean I'm not voting Tory at the next election. But there's no doubt I am – like Adam and Eve being cast out of Eden – leaving the garden of the left. So it seems like a good time to take stock.

Well, as I sit here, getting ready with my kids for the start of Hanukkah (the actually fun Jewish holiday!), things seem fine for British Jews. David Baddiel's documentary Jews Don't Count recently screened on Channel 4 and Jonathan Freedland's Jews. In Their Own Words played at the Royal Court.

The last time I heard from so many Jews was when I went to my cousin Ben's barmitzvah. And yet, all this almost over-the-top fine-ness is a reaction to the very much not-fine-ness that came before.

I don't think any of us want to rehash what I shall delicately refer to as The Corbyn Stuff. But I recently looked up what I'd written during that time and I found a 2016 article in which I mentioned that the Jewish MP Ruth Smeeth was heckled with abuse at the launch of Labour's antisemitism report (contrary to one of Jeremy Corbyn's most famous claims, this Zionist can see the irony in that.)

Afterwards, Corbyn chummily chatted with – no, not Smeeth, but the heckler, ending with a friendly, "I'll call you." And the weirdest thing about this very weird episode is I'd forgotten all about it.

Honestly, what a dumpster fire that whole period was, to the point that it's almost hard to remember what actually happened. But just off the top of my head, here is a list of things I remember lefty non-Jews saying to me back then:
1.    "I don't think you should write about antisemitism because you obviously feel very passionately about it."

2.    "What, exactly, are Jews afraid of here? It's not like Corbyn is going to bring back pogroms."

3.    "Jews have always voted right so of course, they don't like Corbyn."

4.    "It's not that I don't believe that you think he's antisemitic. It's just I think you're being manipulated by bad-faith actors. So let me explain why you're wrong..."

5.    "Come on, you don't really think he really hates Jews."


All of the above were said to me by progressive people, people who would proudly describe themselves as anti-racism campaigners. And yet. When Jews expressed distress at, say, Corbyn describing Hamas as "friends", or attending a wreath-laying ceremony for the killers at the Munich Olympics, or bemoaning the lack of English irony among Zionists, we were fobbed off with snarky tweets and shrugged shoulders.

What we were seeing, they said, we were not actually seeing. You could not design an exercise more perfectly structured to cause madness. It was, to be blunt, gaslighting.

Anyway, that's all in the past now, right? Well it is for me, because I'm walking away. A lot of illusions were broken, and I lost a lot of respect for a lot of people I thought I knew, but it turned out I didn't. Not really. Not at all. So I have left the garden. And it feels bloody great.   

Needless to say I think Starmer is also entirely right in having kicked Corbyn out of the party and having said that he can't, realistically, see a way back for Corbyn into the party.
Let's bomb Russia!

Gups

Hadley Freeman did an article for the Times on the death of 4th Way feminism. So much better than anything I have read by her in the Guardian. I suspect she has been self-censoring a lot (or has been arguing with editors) to avoid bullying by the Owens Joneses at the Guardian.

Syt

Quote from: Tamas on December 06, 2022, 08:15:20 AM
Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 05, 2022, 11:48:01 PMIn England a booster shot is called a borcestershire shot.

Stolen from interweb.

 :lol:

Yeah that took some getting used to here.

Display on train: next stop, Worcester Park. Audio announcer: next stop: wosta' park

Still not as bad as "Fenshaw" :P
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featherstonhaugh
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
—Stephen Jay Gould

Proud owner of 42 Zoupa Points.

OttoVonBismarck

FWIW few British politicians have elicited as much personal animosity in me as Corbyn, but I think he really just represents the left in the entire West having a tremendously terrible time differentiating disagreement with some of Israel's Palestine policy--particularly the policy strongly supported by the 40%-45% of Israel's electorate who are hardcore nationalist/Jewish supremacist ideologues, and Judaism as a world religion.

They apply the same sort of vitriol towards that situation as they do to say, oil companies or pharmaceutical companies or religious conservatives. The issue though is unlike those other groups which all collectively do very bad things, "Jews" as a whole are literally an entire religion with very different communities in different parts of the world and very different views on the Palestine issue. It also ignores that while they can't win elections, a large swathe of Israeli Jewish society has always been against the hardliners on Palestine.

It's really sloppy and it becomes hard to figure why they are so sloppy if there isn't genuine indifference to antisemitism.

What makes it hard to understand is the left has no problem navigating this issue with say, Islam--there are obviously a large swathe of the Islamic world, varying from location to location just how much, that is virulently bigoted, hateful, supports violence against non-Muslims etc; but the left (correctly) doesn't just casually lump in all 2 billion Muslims (and certainly not British Muslims) with them as a "given", while they show no such nuance with Jews.

Tamas

All I'd like to say is that Corbyn is not the typical European Left. Most definitely not typical of anyone within visible sight of the centre-left. The far-left he represents doesn't have any kind of serious support anywhere as far as I am aware, with the possible exception of France.

The Brain

Quote from: OttoVonBismarck on December 06, 2022, 11:58:57 AMFWIW few British politicians have elicited as much personal animosity in me as Corbyn, but I think he really just represents the left in the entire West having a tremendously terrible time differentiating disagreement with some of Israel's Palestine policy--particularly the policy strongly supported by the 40%-45% of Israel's electorate who are hardcore nationalist/Jewish supremacist ideologues, and Judaism as a world religion.

They apply the same sort of vitriol towards that situation as they do to say, oil companies or pharmaceutical companies or religious conservatives. The issue though is unlike those other groups which all collectively do very bad things, "Jews" as a whole are literally an entire religion with very different communities in different parts of the world and very different views on the Palestine issue. It also ignores that while they can't win elections, a large swathe of Israeli Jewish society has always been against the hardliners on Palestine.

It's really sloppy and it becomes hard to figure why they are so sloppy if there isn't genuine indifference to antisemitism.

What makes it hard to understand is the left has no problem navigating this issue with say, Islam--there are obviously a large swathe of the Islamic world, varying from location to location just how much, that is virulently bigoted, hateful, supports violence against non-Muslims etc; but the left (correctly) doesn't just casually lump in all 2 billion Muslims (and certainly not British Muslims) with them as a "given", while they show no such nuance with Jews.

It's garden-variety antisemitism. It isn't supposed to make sense.
Women want me. Men want to be with me.

Sheilbh

Yeah I agree to an extent with Corbyn. But there are, I think, three things with Corbyn that make me think there is more than just a struggle with drawing lines.

The things I find most troubling with a more benign explanation are the line about "Zionists" who "despite having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they ["Zionists"] don't understand English irony" (his defence was that he was referring to Zionists in the "accurate, political sense"), laying a wreath at a memorial service at the graves of Black September members from the Munich Olympics and that he - when he was just a boring backbencher - would address events that also platformed outright Holocaust deniers who were subject to a sort of cordon sanitaire from most Palestine Solidarity campaigns.

The "English irony" comment, especially, just reads as pub bore anti-semitism to me. I also don't buy his defence on using the term "Zionist" there because I don't think that's consistent with noting how long they've lived in the country.

My own read is that at least part of it is that he's the trope of a comfortable Englishman living vicariously through other people's revolutionary causes. He finds the most romantic and possibly the most extreme or violent and backs them from the comfort of his constituency.
Let's bomb Russia!

Sheilbh

Quote from: Tamas on December 06, 2022, 12:07:33 PMAll I'd like to say is that Corbyn is not the typical European Left. Most definitely not typical of anyone within visible sight of the centre-left. The far-left he represents doesn't have any kind of serious support anywhere as far as I am aware, with the possible exception of France.
I'm not sure.

He's not from the centre left, social democratic tradition in Europe. But I think he sits within the left beyond them - it was always a source of frustration in Labour that Corbyn would do events with or big meetings that he'd talk about with Melenchon, Podemos, Syriza, Die Linke rather than Labour's institutional sister parties in the Party of European Socialists or other international bodies.

When he was running for leader he made a lot of being endorsed by people like Varoufakis and Iglesias - as did his (then) supporters and boosters like Owen Jones and Paul Mason. I think, as with most trends in British politics, there's not much that's distinctively British and he reflects wider European trends and forces. There were books written about "left populism" before 2016 about Syriza, Podemos and Corbyn - and there have been re-appraisals since.

I think it's why Starmer has met Scholz - partly to do the serious thing of looking like a future PM meeting a German Chancellor, but also meeting a leader of the SPD which is Labour's sister party. Similarly the big reason David Lammy is shadow foreign secretary is that he's got really good links to the Democrats and his job is to get Starmer a meeting with Biden, while Corbyn's team spent a lot of time trying to set up meetings with Sanders or AOC (who sensibly avoided him).
Let's bomb Russia!

Tamas

I very much doubt any umbrella/center-left party in Europe would have ever elected such a retard caricature communist as Corbyn, let alone such a person achieving any sizeable public support (which Corbyn also failed to achieve in the UK). He is a political outlier.

Sheilbh

Quote from: Tamas on December 06, 2022, 12:31:35 PMI very much doubt any umbrella/center-left party in Europe would have ever elected such a retard caricature communist as Corbyn, let alone such a person achieving any sizeable public support (which Corbyn also failed to achieve in the UK). He is a political outlier.
Melenchon and Syriza have replaced the centre-left parties in their countries.

I think it largely reflects electoral systems. FPTP pushes people towards two parties and those parties become big coalitions. That leaves them vulnerable to entryists or takeover by a fringe in a way that's unimaginable in, say, the SPD.

On the other hand it's difficult to imagine the hard left within Labour wiping out and replacing the centre left forces within Labour in the way that LFI or Syriza have basically destroyed the PS or PASOK. Although I think after Starmer's ruthlessness, if the hard left ever achieve power in Labour again they will try to get rid of the centre left.

I'm not sure how we can say he's a total outlier or somehow unique to the UK when we're only six months past Melenchon coming third, very close to a run-off and his alliance came second in the legislatives. Melenchon, after all, had this response to Corbyn's defeat:
Quote"He (Corbyn) faced unsubstantiated, churlish antisemitism claims from England's chief rabbi and pro-Likud networks," Mr Mélenchon wrote, saying their accusations were one of the major reasons for Labour's defeat.

"Instead of firing back, he spent his time apologising and making pledges. In both cases, he showed weakness."

He continued by saying "Labour and Corbyn's terrible defeat did not surprise me" and vowing to adopt an apparently opposite strategy.

"I will never give in. The pension reform, a liberal and German Europe, Green capitalism, bowing to the arrogant and sectarian dictates of the Crif: No! No means No!"
Let's bomb Russia!

Barrister

Quote from: Sheilbh on December 06, 2022, 12:19:50 PMMy own read is that at least part of it is that he's the trope of a comfortable Englishman living vicariously through other people's revolutionary causes. He finds the most romantic and possibly the most extreme or violent and backs them from the comfort of his constituency.

There's always been a Manichean streak running through certain hard-left circles.  The world is divided into good people and causes, and bad people and causes.  The working class, LGBTQ, minorities and the global south are good; the rich, straights, whites and the West are bad.  There's just no nuance.

And for much of the time you can get away with such a world view.  But when it buts up against a seriously complicated issue like Israel / Palestine the flaws of such reasoning become obvious.

Ukraine is another such issue for the hard left.  Since war is bad, and the west is bad, the west sending weapons to Ukraine is doubly bad - even though that means tacitly supporting a genocidal imperial power from conquering a neighbouring country.

Obviously "not all leftists" (or even most)...
Posts here are my own private opinions.  I do not speak for my employer.

Josquius

What is strange about Corbyn is not that his ilk exist, they always have been there floating around the fringe. But that they successfully managed to take over the party....and then completely fall flat with their populism with the public at large. I guess that shit only works from the right.
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